Aqua Best - a fish store on Manhattan’s lower east side owned by a family friend.
I decide to drive into the city on Tuesday around 5pm — almost on a whim. I head over the Manhattan bridge, take a right on Grand after passing the playground on Chrystie. All up and down Chrystie Street and Forsyth - and even along Grand - there are parking spots all over the place. Plastic bags and scraps of paper dart through the air, held up by wind that is unencumbered. On a normal Tuesday, those bags would be trampled down, kicked aside, swept away, somehow kept in check by one of several possible factors: delivery trucks, fire engines, cop cars, people exiting or entering cars, cabbies pulling into the cab stand, bus drivers, pedestrians, little old ladies with laundry baskets, bikers, men on trikes loaded up with tools, well dressed women pushing a $1,500 heavy duty stroller. Today, all such factors are gone. The litter is free to blow around at knee level and higher; occasionally slapping against your pants, or even drifting up to eye level, forcing you to duck or swat like a dumb ass tourist. Of the people who do walk around, three quarters wear face masks. A few actually have the proper N-95 respirators, but most of the masks I see look like they’re made out of the same paper-thin gauzy material as the disposable pajamas you are given when you get an MRI.
I park on Grand, directly across from Aqua Best, shut off the engine, and for a moment consider putting money in the meter. I push the hazard lights on instead, open my door, and tell my daughters to stay close to me — don’t go in the store with me, keep your distance from people. I speak in a calm but terse military manner. When I walk in, there are 2 employees: a young guy, thirty five maybe, at the register wearing surgical gloves, no mask; the other, a tall Chinese grampa type wearing a gauzy white face mask, hands clasped behind his back. Many of the bins are covered, but up front I see a few baskets of blue crabs, some whole fish (red snapper and cat fish), a few sting rays, and a bus tub of razor clams. There are also 2 large tanks of lobsters.
“Hey, is Freeman around?” I asked both of them.
“He’s not feeling well. Stayed at home today.”
Freeman is the owner of Aqua Best. Well, more accurately, his family has owned the place for two generations, and he and his siblings run it. A year earlier, Freeman branched out on his own with a high-end seafood restaurant and raw bar called Essex Pearl. It’s located on the lower floor of a glitzy new commercial development, surrounded by high rise condos with million dollar studio apartments, and half a block away from the soon-to-launch Low Line - the East Side’s answer to the High Line. Rent is fucking astronomical.
Having grown up in Chinatown, especially in an entrepreneurial Chinese family running a successful fish business, let me just say that Freeman is not walking around with his head shoved up his ass. He knows how to hustle and get shit done; knows the value of hard work, and treating people with respect. He went to school with my wife at the Catholic elementary school, down the street from the Knickerbocker. Our daughters have attended the same schools since kindergarten: first in Little Italy, later in Chelsea.
I felt bad for him now, because I know what kind of dough is required to keep a place like Essex Pearl open - the monthly rent alone will set you back more than a Tesla. I wanted to spend a lot of money at his store, but didn’t really see much of anything I wanted. To be honest, I was starting to have second thoughts about even coming into Manhattan. The sight of empty streets and the mask-wearing people ducking and weaving through litter was making me very self conscious. I decided on 2 dozen littleneck clams and half a dozen scallops. I placed $25 on the counter, received my change, and drove back to Brooklyn across the Manhattan Bridge.